Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
Fairer Funding in Social Sciences Masks Gender Imbalance
Even when the news is good — women win grants from the ESRC at the same rate as men, and those grants are actually a bit larger on average — it’s tinged with bad — because there are so few senior women in academic social sciences men still get majority of the money.
Ranking African Universities Fraught and Futile
The director of directs the International Network for Higher Education in Africa argues that a nascent effort to rank the continent’s institutions of higher education ‘seems to me to be doomed from the start.’
Five Things to Think About if You’re Considering a Doctorate
After collecting reflections on their PhD journey from 28 doctoral scholars, Rhodes University’s Sioux McKenna distilled some of their collected wisdom into five ideas that might make the uphill effort to earn a doctorate less of of a Sisyphean task.
We Found Only a Third of Top-Drawer Psych Studies Reliable
A small but vocal contingent of researchers has maintained that many, perhaps most, published studies are wrong. But how bad is this problem, exactly? And what features make a study more or less likely to turn out to be true? A team of 270 researchers asked the question of published psychology studies.
Life Itself is One Big Exercise of the Prisoner’s Dilemma
The professor whose use of the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ in his class went viral here explains how that same piece of game theory can help bridge liberal and conservative differences.
Weeding the Books Out of Academic Libraries
The printed book, though still part of the academic library ensemble, is being relegated to the role of supporting player rather than the lead actor, argues a University of California librarian.
Beware! Big Data Is Not Free of Discrimination
Math can be immoral. too. Algorithms rarely come equipped with an explanation for why they behave the way they do, notes mathematician Jeremy Kun, and the easy (and dangerous) course of action is not to ask questions.
A Modicum of Common Sense Helps Interpret Open Access Publishing
No one ever assumed that everything in print was trustworthy, says Virginia Barbour, and neither should that be the case for open access content. Content is what matters – whether delivered by open access, subscription publishing, or a printed document.
